From psychotherapy to psychoanalysis: Frederik van Eeden and Albert Willem van Renterghem

At the end of the nineteenth century, the unconscious was discovered by various students of the human mind. No agreement existed, however, about its nature--whether it represented the seat of the abnormal, the supranormal, or both. Frederik van Eeden (1860-1932), better known as a writer than as a physician, and Albert Willem van Renterghem (1846-1939), a country doctor, were both attracted by the philosophy of psychic monism and were disappointed by official medical science. They felt that the mind played a greater role in curing and healing than official medicine could acknowledge. Van Eeden, a socialist, moved away from medical science. Fascinated by psychical research, he embraced Spiritualism and joined the Roman Catholic Church. His attitude toward psychoanalysis was ambivalent. Van Renterghem, by contrast, became a respected and well-to-do psychiatrist, and was one of the first Dutch physicians to embrace psychoanalysis. This study of two Dutch psychiatrists shows on the one hand that only gradually the mystically tinged soul of the first dynamic psychiatry became the conscious and unconscious mind of depth psychology, and on the other hand that the reception of psychoanalysis was furthered by the prevailing interest in mysticism.